I've set up an rdiff-backup system for backing up files from 3 machines and I'm very happy with the way the program works. I have a few questions I'm hoping you guys can help me out with.
Security: My laptop is one of the systems I want to back up and when I travel it ends up behind a router I have no control over. Because of this, my systems push to the backup server instead of the backup server pulling from them. Because I'm pushing, I can't restrict the public SSH keys on the backup server to read-only. I think this means that if any of my private keys are stolen, the thief will have full read/write access to all files owned by the user "holding" the public SSH key, although that access will be limited to the rdiff-backup binary. I've prefixed the public SSH keys on my backup server like this: command="rdiff-backup --server",no-port-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-pty ssh-rsa ... root@laptop command="rdiff-backup --server",from="12.34.56.78",no-port-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-pty ssh-rsa ... root@desktop Since I don't want to provide root write access with SSH keys, another drawback of the push configuration is that root ownership is not preserved in the backups which I imagine will hinder restores. Are there any other issues to consider when using rdiff-backup in this way? Non-Security: If I deleted a file from one of my systems 61 days ago and today I run --remove-older-than 60D, will the original file be deleted from the backup or only the increments? I'm backing up to a 1TB USB hard drive dedicated to backups. How low should I set the super-user space reservation on that drive? I'd like to store an additional copy of the backups on a remote system. Would it be best to rsync between the USB hard drive and the remote system? What happens if a file changes while rdiff-backup is reading it? - Grant _______________________________________________ rdiff-backup-users mailing list at [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/rdiff-backup-users Wiki URL: http://rdiff-backup.solutionsfirst.com.au/index.php/RdiffBackupWiki
